


The Night before the Morning After

by likeadeuce



Category: Marvel, X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Angst, Crying, F/M, Kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-06
Updated: 2010-03-06
Packaged: 2017-10-07 18:49:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/68101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likeadeuce/pseuds/likeadeuce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scott and Jean have had another fight, and Jean has had enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Night before the Morning After

They'd had another fight. Or, rather, they'd had half a fight. The prerequisite to actually fighting with Scott was getting him to admit that something was at stake, that it was bothering him, that he was not,as he would relentlessly insist if given the chance, fine.

"You're tired," she said. "You haven't slept in days. You're not any good to anybody like this, let yourself sleep." _I can help you sleep_, she was going to say, but then -- he looked. Not at her. Not through her. Not even past her. He looked in her direction, not as though she wasn't there, but as though he didn't know who she was.

And something broke. Something between them, something inside her, she didn't really know where it was -- but she felt it break. There were things she could have said: _I'm frightened, too. I'm hurting, too._ Maybe before, she would have said them. But something in Jean has always been proud, and something in Jean has always been hard, and while Scott wasn't with her -- when he was with Apocalypse, when every charged particle of the sense they were supposed to share told her he was dead -- the proud hard bits of her had to take hold, to keep her from crumbling into the kind of ashes that could never rise.

Then he came back to her. She had her miracle. But he wasn't the same husband and she couldn't be the same wife. She had never wanted to go on without him, but now they both knew that she could, and they were different for knowing it. When they had to, they blamed the demon.

Scott looked at her like he didn't know who she was. The last filament of their old connection snapped. When Jean left the mansion, she knew where she was going.

*

Her steps never faltered on the long climb. Jean never doubted her path. He thought he could hide. Never from her.

He sat with his arms and legs crossed, under an old cedar tree.

"Meditation. I got half burned to death . . .Kinda maxed out my healing factor."

Jean raised an eyebrow. "And that's why you've been up here for four days?" She smiled now, her face felt warm, and it slowly dawned on her that the heat wasn't from shame but a sharper, darker feeling. Once she had made her choice, at last, the guilt seemed to fall away. She had lived with the feeling and so had Logan; as for Scott, he must think that they had done this, already, years ago. He must think he's been a good man, a good soldier, for pretending not to know. It was different now. They were going to do something about it.

"I wish he would hold me the way he used to," said Jean. She put her hand on Logan's arm. "I wish it didn't matter. I feel like an idiot." His face turned slowly toward her, but nothing in her was tentative, or cautious. She put her hands on his face, drew his mouth toward her, and she could already feel how it would be -- nails tearing into her back, thighs compact and powerful over hers. He would push her to the ground, would take her the way she always knew he wanted to -- the way, even now, she felt him wanting -- and their breath and their bodies would slam together, and when it was over. . .

When it was over, she would walk down the mountain, and since she wouldn't need her husband to be her lover anymore, she could be a better friend, a better partner, a better wife.

And then Logan surprised her. Jean put a particular value on the few people capable of surprising her. But she didn't want him to surprise her now. "We both know the deal," he said. "We always have. It would never work between us."

Jean couldn't understand, at first. She watched him walk away for a long moment -- was this a joke, a flirtation, a test? -- before the truth hit her. He was walking away.

*

One of many mixed blessings of Jean's gift is a perfect memory. She can call up a moment and replay it in her mind. It doesn't take much from there to slip onto the astral plane, to walk back into the recollection and start to change it up.

This scene has played out many times. Her telekinesis was coming back, then; she called it a muscle that she was learning to stretch again. Most of the time, when she remembers this moment, Jean Grey reaches out with that big muscle and slams Logan's strong hard back into a tree. She stands in front of him, and she puts her hand on his throat, and she says, "I'm not a headstrong little girl and you don't need to save me from myself. I am Phoenix, and Phoenix knows her own desires." Then she kisses him again, digs her nails into his chest, and all his hard-headed nobility dissolves in the face of her power.

*

That wasn't the way it happened.

That night on the mountaintop, Jean watched Logan walk away. Her feet began to shake and she fell back against a tree. She slumped down against the trunk, dug her hands into the peat of the earth and clenched them around needles and bark, and -- when the swirling Alpha Waves told her he had gone too far for even his heightened senses to hear -- Jean cried.

She cried wet gulping animal sobs, sobs that left her eyes swollen and her nose wet, her lungs and chest and stomach muscles every bit as spent as if she had managed to get herself so very well-fucked, after all. It wasn't the way she cried the year before, when she thought Scott was dead. It was the way she cried when she was seventeen and she thought he had contempt for her, because she was only the girl and her powers were weak and she asked silly questions and he never looked at her the way that Warren did.

Up on the ridge, far above the mansion, Jean curled in the dirt and cried like a heartbroken teenager. She didn't know whether it was because Logan didn't want her, or because he must see her as a whore now, or because he would probably forget it all in the morning. She didn't know if she was crying because Scott had stopped loving her or she had stopped loving him, or because neither of them had, neither of them had managed to stop, even though, for their own and everyone's sake, they probably should have. She kept crying until her ragged tears faded into sleep.

*

Light came early against the east side of the mountain. Jean woke up with sun in her eyes, leaves in her hair, and a light film of morning dew on her hands, face, and clothing. She sat up, touched her forehead, and remembered all at once: Scott's gaze, and the climb, her words and the kiss. Logan's retreating back and the realization that he wouldn't -- he really wouldn't -- be coming back for her.

Then Jean looked up at the blinding sun, and she laughed. She got to her feet -- wincing, stretching -- and brushed leaves off, laughing the whole time because she understood. Sleep and the light of a new brilliant day had let the puzzle fall together. Logan walked away, Jean thought, because he believes in us. Still, and in spite of everything, at least one person on this earth still thinks that Scott and I have a chance.

She pushed her eyes shut and breathed in, picturing the frayed edge of their psychic bond, and calling out to him. _Scott, honey? Don't go anywhere. I'm coming home._

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on an incident in New X-Men 117, and the dialogue between Jean and Logan comes from that issue.


End file.
